The options for air and water cooling your CPU have expanded greatly over the years. It’s now possible to get some very quiet air cooling solutions, but the trade off is that the heatsink you fit inside your case is very large and heavy. Water cooling on the other hand may be more expensive, but it is quieter and moves the bulk away from your CPU. It’s also improving, as Zalman has just demonstrated with the announcement of the Reserator 3.

Zalman is claiming that the Reserator 3 is the world’s first liquid cooler to use nanofluids. What’s that then? It involves adding refrigerant nanoparticles to the fluid that gets pumped around inside the cooler transporting the heat produced by a CPU to the radiator and fan where it is expelled.

By using the so-called nanofluid, Zalman believes it can offer better cooling, and rates the Reserator 3 as offering up to 400W of cooling while remaining very quiet. The fluid and pump is supplemented by a dual copper radiator design and “quadro cooling path,” which consists of two copper pipes sitting behind the fan and surrounded by the radiators. The heatsink sitting on top of the CPU is a micro-fin copper base allowing very quick transfer of heat to the nanofluid above.

The Reserator 3 pumps up to 90 liters of water every hour, and if you want extra cooling you can attach a second 120mm fan to the radiator section. It also ships with plates to fit most chips, with support confirmed for Intel 2011, 1366, 1155/1156, 1150, 775 sockets and AMD FM2, FM1, AM3+, AM3, AM2+, and AM2 sockets.

We don’t have a release date or price yet, unfortunately, but the fact the Reserator 3 has appeared on Zalman’s website means it can’t be too far off seeing a release.